Naw, naw. Whatchu gotta do is t' free up more capital.

Thanks to all (one of you) who voted in last week's poll. I shall indeed write this post "about" the economy.

I've been reading some newspapers and blogs and whatnot, and it seems to me everyone is looking to report on the silver lining that surrounds this massive cumulonimbus mess we've got hovering over us. I've seen reports about how cobblers are having increased business as more people look to mend their shoes. Saw something today about how there are less divorces during hard economic times (though I don't know if the marriages preserved solely by depressions are walks in the park). And I'm sure we're just months away from the "hobo-chic" trend sweeping the runways in Milan.

But despite all these sunny goodtime scenarios, I'd like to nominate another candidate as one of the worst spinoffs of the current downturn -- people trying to talk economics. People who shouldn't. People who aren't, by any stretch of the admittedly already-loose definition, economists.

I'm a real big hater on cable news generally these days, but man -- unleash these blabberlips on the subject of fiscal stimulus or capital markets or protectionism or anything this side of missing 3-year-olds and they instantly make clear that they don't know what they're talking about -- even to me, who also doesn't know what they're talking about.

In my line of work, I find myself privy to the musings of a pretty broad cross section of the public. These people are not idiots. When we tackle the usual small-talk niceties, they just nail it. I mean, when it's a cold day out, by God, they aren't going to tell you it's hot. Y'know? When the Ravens looked overmatched against the Steelers the next weekend, they weren't coming in crowing about Baltimore on Friday -- and they showed reserve enough not to tell me "told you so" on Monday.

But, dude, people I run into at work and in my own life are letting some under-their-breath things slip about what they don't like about the stimulus bill or about TARP or about the plan to bail out homeowners. If their complaints were only that the plans were too obtuse, that would be one thing. But people have watched just enough cable news to think they know something. By and large, I think most people in the country are just letting the educated guys and gals we asked for (or didn't) give things their best shot. Some are hoping for success and some are hoping for a perception of failure that lasts at least long enough for their political advantage. This is all well and good. I just cannot take much more of the vocal minority of people who loudly express their barely-informed opinions on matters which learned economists themselves struggle to grasp the complexities of.

Nevertheless I reserve the right to vet my ill-considered remedies for our malaise whenever I see fit. Perhaps I will next discuss nationalizing the banks. It's my blog. Suck it.

And We Will All Splash Down Together

I don't presume myself to be the first to either have this thought or publish it online, but here goes anyway.

The idea I want to explore is not exactly that the USAirways flight that ended in the Hudson River the other day was quite a bit of good news, nor that this Sully guy is one hell of a pilot, nor that Canada Geese (unverified culprit as yet) can be quite problematic.

What I've spent some time thinking about is why this story resonates so strongly right now. Why I'm still thinking about it a day and a half later. Why Chris Matthews gave the pilot something called "the Hardball award" (he was pretty excited about this story, but apparently didn't quite reach the point of chills or thrills going up his leg). Don't get me wrong, I know this is a fantastic story that would get a lot of play no matter when it happened. Still, I think that a lot of people are looking at this wanting to read it as a metaphor for our whole situation at this moment in history. This plane crash is not just significant as one of the happiest accidents we've seen.

You don't have to watch CNBC these days to feel like the American economy -- hell, the world economy -- has lost both engines, and we find ourselves passengers aboard what has become a mammoth glider, the controls of which we don't understand. While our pre-crash moment is stretched out over months instead of minutes, we've heard the "Brace for Impact" announcement, and nobody's flipping through the SkyMall catalog anymore (not that we don't still secretly lust after that hot dog roller they sell). Most of us board planes without any real understanding of how the things get airborne, and investors have made and lost money investing it things they couldn't begin to explain.

I think many people have accepted that we're going to have to ditch this plane, so we're inclined to take a lot of comfort in this crash, where a couple legs were broken, and, of course, the plane was lost, but most everyone came out just cold, wet, shaken, and thrilled to be alive. People are putting a lot of faith in a new president to steer us away from the skyscrapers and come in at precisely the right angle so we don't crack up completely. We know that things are going to get even more chaotic once we're down, and the cabin starts filling with icewater. We know that it's not going to be particularly orderly, and that some people are going to block the aisle trying to retrieve items from the overhead bin (alright, so I'm not sure what that's a metaphor for). But with enough people looking out for others, we might all come out alive.

Isn't that a nice thought?